The Other End

Last year I listened to an interesting podcast interview with John Shirley where he talked about his new book that he was working on at the time. That book, The Other End, has finally come out and I read it over the weekend. It's a great antidote to all those nasty Christian rapture books. In the pattern of Ken McLeod calling The Singularity "the rapture for nerds" I think the "end" in The Other End is like the rapture for atheists.

If the end of the world were to come as described in this book, I don't think any atheists would complain much. Some of the elements in the story seemed to be plucked from my own day dreams about people really waking up to what is going on around them. Looking up a name in the book lead me to this interesting Wikipedia page about an imperfect creator god.

Another book I zipped through over the weekend was Steven C. (not J.) Gould's latest Jumper novel, Griffin's Story. The first, Jumper and it's sequel Reflex are definitely near the top of my all time favorite books. They are making a movie based on Jumper due to come out in 2008. As expected the movie's plot has diverged quite a bit from the original books. In Griffin's Story, Steven Gould took the interesting tactic of making it consistent with the movie, and not the original world of the first two books. I thought that would annoy me, but the inconsistencies were minor and didn't bother me much. I finished the book way too quickly and I certainly hope he plans to write more Jumper books in the future.